Monday, 11 June 2012

EPUBLISHING ON THE KUBRICK MODEL by John A. A. Logan

Woody
Allen has said in an interview how much he had loved Stanley Kubrick’s 1964
black satirical comedy, DR STRANGELOVE, and that, like many others, he then
waited four expectant years for Kubrick’s next film to appear. Allen sat in the
darkness of the cinema and watched all of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. He exited the
cinema, just thinking “what was that?” He couldn’t make head nor tail of
Kubrick’s new film and was very disappointed.

A
week later, says Allen, he went back to see 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.

On
the second viewing, Allen loved it and concluded this was one of the best films
he had ever seen in his life.

And
so the confounding of expectations…particularly in cinema and literature, genre
expectations, can go…

Kubrick
seemed to delight in radical shifts in subject matter from film to film: from
noir to war, from satire to science fiction, from the distant past of SPARTACUS
to the dystopian future of A CLOCKWORK ORANGE; from the candle-lit 18th
century picture-frame beauty of BARRY LYNDON, to the Stephen King horror of THE
SHINING; from the austere sacrifice and betrayal of PATHS OF GLORY to the epic
comedy of frustration that is LOLITA.

It
was as though his mind was playing a game of private battleships, shifting
co-ordinates radically from project to project rather than stick with the
tried-and-tested…perhaps hoping thus to hit upon some unimaginable spiritual
motherlode of material…and surely he succeeded at this better than most.

He
was able to do this because, one way or another, he always remained independent
enough to retain control of his own material. Often met with mixed reviews on
release, his films were recognised years later as masterpieces.

Notice
that word: Independent

For
decades of course, authors have been robbed of this factor. If the author was
successful with a first book, like Kurt Vonnegut, they were then required to BE
a science fiction author exclusively (often to Vonnegut’s dismay, resenting not
the science fiction genre, but the limitations he encountered when trying to
step outwith it); similarly Ian Rankin, who thought he had written a literary
fiction novel, and would go into the bookshops in Edinburgh and move his first
novel out of the crime section and into literary fiction, only to have to give
up in the end as the bookshop staff kept replacing it in the crime section.

Some
authors, of course, get round this by writing under more than one name, when
writing in different genres.

But
I wonder whether the Kubrick model might not be an excellent one for an
INDEPENDENT author to follow, should they feel the desire to do so?

Creativity,
when unfettered, seems to lend itself to such boundlessness: I can already see
the evidence of this in the descriptions of books like Roz Morris’ “strange and
stubborn book”, MY MEMORIES OF A FUTURE LIFE, a literary work where a musician
finds her soul pulled towards a future reality which may only be a figment; or
Cally Phillips’ THE THREADS OF TIME where the tension and spiritual connection
is between a love story set in the 1990s, and another taking place across a
time-span of two-and-a-half-thousand years into the distant past; or take the
book description for Dan Holloway’s SONGS FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL, “a
coming of age story that inhabits anti-capitalist chatrooms and ancient wine
cellars, seedy bars and dreaming spires; and takes us on a remarkable journey
across Europe and cyberspace in the company of rock stars and dropouts, diaries
that appear from nowhere, a telepathic fashion mogul, and the talking statue of
a bull.”

Freedom
to cross genres indeed.

Freedom
to bring to the subject matter as much, or as little, of a “literary”/”quality”
“voice” as the author feels fits the story, or their own intentions.

So
no need for literary fiction to be devoid of action or story; no need for genre
fiction to be devoid of literary voice.

Let
the reader decide, after all.

I
did some relaxed “market research” over at Goodreads and Amazon forums. The
feedback from voracious readers was that they do not mind at all if an author
shifts from genre to genre with successive books, in fact they quite like this,
just as Kubrick must have quite liked doing it, and the many Kubrick fans liked
it too, even if, as in Woody Allen’s case, it might take a week and two
viewings to make the mental leap on occasions.

And
by the author writing under one name, there is a potential to unify these
multi-coloured strands of work which the imagination seems to wish to generate
when left to its own devices, its own INDEPENDENCE.

And,
in this way, the author’s fans will be able to find all their work more easily!

What
an astonishing idea, the author being allowed to write under one name, even
under one pseudonym if they wish.

After
all, as John Proctor said in THE CRUCIBLE:

“Because
it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign
myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang!
How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”

My
name is John Logan, but to publish I had to “become” John A. A. Logan, as there
is already a very famous screenwriter and author out there, and on Kindle,
named John Logan.

But
really, I was not “becoming” anything, I was reverting to the original, as my
middle intitials really are A. A. (for Andrew, Alexander…named after the 19th
century Scottish Highland farmers who were my ancestors)…but I had not used the
middle initials for so long it did feel like a bit of a “becoming” to place
them on a book cover…and John Proctor’s words raised a hackle on my back as I
did so.

Perhaps,
once we have our name in place, then we have to look again at this freedom to
“cross genres” of subject matter and whether we truly have it.

In
my case, these considerations may be very important.

My
first novel that I had a literary agent represent, ROCKS IN THE HEAD, is a
social realist coming-of-age story; my second novel, which was represented by
the same agent, is THE MAJOR, a book about a blue collar manager of a Tyre
Supply Depot who is really a cosmic visitor from the universe’s furthest
reaches, come to town to do great and terrible mischief amongst the
unsuspecting locals.

My
fourth novel, STARNEGIN’S CAMP, is set two thousand years ago when an un-named,
insane Emperor who wishes to begin a colony, impregnates 18 young women with
his supposedly Divine seed and sends them on a ship to the uncharted other side
of the world, where Starnegin, the camp’s leader who was sent out a year
earlier to establish a safe base in the primal forest, has deserted his post
and leaves the camp every day, disappearing into the forest to do
no-one-knows-what…until the women arrive in the boat to disrupt his new and
secret life in the woods, and an old friend follows him there one day…to see
what he has been doing all those months…

My
fifth novel is THE SURVIVAL OF THOMAS FORD, a literary thriller which 20000
people now have in their Kindles, Ipads etc…and which my second literary agent
has just asked me to write a synopsis of for film producers.

My
sixth novel is one-quarter completed and untitled, and when it is finished I
will have to decide whether to epublish it INDEPENDENTLY or hand it over to my
agent who wants to send it round the London publishers...like The Survival of
Thomas Ford was sent round the London publishers last year…

In
the meantime though, I have a new ebook which I will put out in a few weeks, a
story collection entitled STORM DAMAGE, consisting of nine stories totalling
225 pages; with subject matter ranging from NAPOLEON’S CHILD, where a young boy
appears inexplicably out of a desert one night…to UNICORN ONE, the tale of a
strange choice of astronaut for Scotland’s first ever Independent Space Program…to
THE AIRMAN, a ghost story about a World War Two bombing raid over Dresden that
ends up in modern India…

Disparate
tales then, constituting 7 books and 23 years’ work.

Whether
this constitutes a lifetime’s work, or half a lifetime’s, remains to be seen!

And
all the work to be unified under one independent
name, with my old friend Stanley to turn to for comfort and inspiration
should I waver in the wee small hours of what sometimes feels like eternity’s
edge but is perhaps only the prelude to a new dawn.

13 comments:

Great points eloquently made. Scotching yet another myth - that we have to stay in a box if we achieve a 'success.' Ebooks allow us to explore, evaluate, adapt and even throw away the rulebook (or mythologies) if we like. But the BEST thing about this post is the news that we're going to get to read something more by you IN THE NEAR FUTURE. I, for one, can't wait.

This will make your writer's biography an interesting one. When I was readin Margery Allingham the scales fell from my eyes when I began to read chronologically and realised the extent to which she was re-dressing imbalances between one novel and the next. If one was rich in detail, wide-ranging but slower paced, the next would be spare and focussed and thrillerish. They were tightly held within the 'mystery' box and she was often under pressure from her publishers to write more, writer more quickly, be like SAgatha Christie. But this quality of private experiementation was absolutely key to her transcending her genre. Your sequence looks far more radically challenging but I bet there's an inner logic that you know and that would make a story in itself. Best of luck with the film synopsis. Makes the pulse beat faster!

Kubrick is a great example - his films are so different and yet you would only have to watch a few frames to spot a film that's his (I think it's something I can't describe any other way than a mix of the depth of shot and chiaroscuro effect filming combined with the smoothness and pace of the camera movement), which is a very good way of thinking about "voice".

There is a lot about Kubrick that reminds me of you - from the style through the publicity-shyness to, of course, the extremely careful crafting and subsequent famous seven year gaps between films. It wouldn't surprise me if you were to leave a body of work of similar note

There are plenty of writers who cross genres in the world of conventional publishing - think M John Harrison or Margaret Atwood or Michael Chabon. And I have a suspicion that Kubrick would not have used a phrase like 'prelude to a new dawn' to describe what he was after - at least not seriously. His irony and caustic vision are legendary.

Great post - and I so agree with you. I hate being confined to a single genre when writing - it's like having to eat the same meal over and over because you loved it the first time you tasted it. Being independent means margins can be pushed, characters can be stretched and there is nothing to restrain the imagination of the writer.

Another interesting post. I like the way you just leap in and tell it like it is! Over the past ten or twenty years, it seems to me, publishing has become ever more constrained by the restrictive demands of 'sales and marketing'. I remember reading something on the Passive Voice blog to the effect that any business which allowed its sales and marketing department to dictate product development, was probably already in a certain amount of trouble, and it certainly seemed that way to me. Sales reports may inform product development but never dictate it, because of the distinct possibility that they may not be connecting with the right markets, but may be blaming this on the product. You get the distinct impression that that's what happened in conventional publishing. Not ALL conventional publishing, but a significant part of it. Ever narrowing genre demands seem to me to be a symptom of this attitude.

That was a good point that certain successful authors are "trapped" in the genre of their first success. I can understand why publishers would want to keep them in the most profitable field, it really does limit quite a bit of creativity.

Another good one by Mr John A.A. Logan! Yes, indeed, experimentation is a wondrous idea. I myself recently have been working on a mystery series and I alternate these books with other "stand-alone" titles. I love them all, but I need a break from the series to do something different.

I'm thrilled that Thomas Ford could become a movie, John. I hope you'll let your agent shop the next one around, too, even if just for a little while. And 20,000 readers? You're on FIRE!!! :) So glad to connect with you.

This is very encouraging. I've been baffled by my own work as to what to do. I write literary, literary sci-fi, comedy sci-fi but all with an underlying way of seeing the world and a particular level of lyricism or play with language. I wondered whether to go traditional with the literary as Alison Wells (I've been subbing a literary novel traditionallhy) and I've just taken the step of self-publishing what publishers felt was a cross genre novel (the space comedy for women) as A.B. Wells. Your experiences and areas of writing have many parallels, though you are much further along the path. I thank you for sharing these experiences and wish you continued freedom, success and satisfaction. Alison